I, Who Did Not Die Read online

  Casablanca lived up to its reputation—I walked off the plane and into a swirling bazaar of delicacies, of both the edible and the female kind. I wore a tight suit with wide lapels, just like John Travolta, and bought drinks at the bar for everyone around me. The Moroccan women I met were extremely generous with their time and attention. They didn’t cover their heads with hijabs or concern themselves with family honor, which was all right with me. I danced and dined and kissed a different girl each night, like a prophet in paradise.

  In fact, I was contemplating extending my vacation by a second month when I turned on the TV news in my rented apartment one morning and discovered that I was suddenly a wanted man. Saddam had ordered all Iraqi men outside the country who were of fighting age to return immediately, which included those born in 1952 like me. The Iraqi government was getting increasingly worried that the Islamic Revolution in Iran would spill over the border and create a similar Shia uprising against the Baathist ruling party. Peace envoys from the United Nations had been trying to calm both sides, but it backfired into a buildup for war. My legs gave out, and I sank back onto the bed. For a fleeting second, I fantasized about staying in Morocco, where no one could find me. But the government could find my family, and I could never live with myself if they were harmed because of me. I had no choice but to defend my country. But I was getting ahead of myself. Being called back to Iraq wasn’t the same thing as being conscripted. Maybe I’d get lucky; maybe the military wouldn’t call my name for active duty. I packed my dancing shoes and caught an early flight back to Baghdad.

  When I returned to the restaurant, there was less laughter inside. It was as if everyone could smell the war coming. There were clues everywhere, in the form of little annoyances, beginning with the shelves emptying in the supply closet. My usual vendors were coming up short, and I’d have to travel to three or four different places to get enough propane or chickpea flour. Then the electricity started cutting out sporadically and we had to keep the restaurant open with candlelight. As more and more men were called to duty, the lines at my counter grew shorter. Every day more military jeeps passed by my restaurant’s glass storefront. The final blow was the air raid siren. There I’d be, up to my elbows in falafel paste, and the long wail would sound, spiraling higher and faster in tone, and all my customers would flee to the mosque or one of the public underground bunkers. I turned off the lights and locked the doors and stayed with my restaurant, like a captain with his ship. I sequestered myself in the pantry, where I had a lot of time to think about the future—a future without propane. No flame, no falafel.

  I loved this restaurant more than I’d loved any woman. I only left it to catch four hours of sleep a night, yet I never ran out of energy. These walls fed me, clothed me, and gave me the education I never finished, as I listened to my customers hold forth on an encyclopedia of topics. Bruce Lee Restaurant was where I made sense. I had believed this little nothing of a falafel shop was going to take care of my entire family long past the time when we all had grandchildren of our own. Now, if I stayed and watched my restaurant crumble around me, regret would coat me like a second skin. I could get out now with some money saved, or watch everything I’d earned slip from my hands. The choice was obvious. I locked the door, returned the keys to my brother-in-law, and took a bus back to my father’s house in Basra. By the time I arrived, I had a migraine from clenching my jaw to keep from crying.

  The only solace was that my father truly needed me. Newly divorced, he was exhausting himself working his nine-to-five job overseeing shipments at the port while also raising my five younger siblings. My first errand of each day was to get up before dawn and fetch fresh bread for my brothers and sisters. The two lines outside the bakery window—one for men, one for women—started queuing as early as three thirty in the morning. There was a system. One male would approach the window, hand over coins, and take a package of steaming bread. Then a female took her turn, and so on. It was safer for the women this way; they wouldn’t be harassed by the men or be seen talking to them in public.

  One morning, a flash of red caught my eye. I snuck a glance over to the women’s line, and although it was still dark and all the women were covered, except for their faces, in ankle-length black abayas, I could see one teenage girl had a crimson dress under hers. She had tossed part of her cloak casually over her forearm to reveal a bit of her legs and a peek of that red fabric.

  I lit a cigarette and tried to look cool, tilting my head back and blowing a stream of smoke straight into the air. I did this a few times and then snuck another glance. Playfully, she waved imaginary smoke away from her face. Or did she? Maybe it was only a mosquito.

  The line was moving, but we stayed in lockstep, thirty feet apart from each other. Curiosity curled around my neck and squeezed; I wanted to see her face. When a car drove past, I waited until its headlights crossed her body then turned all the way to face her. And she let me gaze. Her beauty was suspended in that momentary portal between child and woman; her cheekbones were just beginning to protrude from the round cheeks of a girl. Her olive skin looked untouched, and the ripeness of her held an intoxicating collision of innocence and power that she didn’t yet know she had. She gazed back for a brief second and then cast her eyes downward. I shivered, suddenly realizing I was sweating in the cold morning air. Looking at her, all the girls I thought I’d loved fell out of my heart.

  “Sir? Sir? Sir! You’re next!”

  I reached through the window for three loaves of warm bread. When I turned around, she had vanished back into the darkness.

  When I spotted her the next morning, she was chatting with her girlfriends and didn’t seem the least bit aware of me. I felt like an idiot, mistaking her swatting at mosquitoes for romance. But before I gave up hope, I had to try one last signal to be sure, so I pretended to run my fingers through my hair and gave her a quick wave. As I waited for a response, my left leg started to jiggle uncontrollably. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her adjust her abaya behind her ear to reveal a bit of her dark hair. The movement seemed innocuous, but just before she dropped her hand she quickly waved back.

  Salaam, habibi!

  We spoke for the next four months in our silent language, through invisible gestures only lovers can see. We both began showing up earlier and earlier to the bakery line so we could extend our sightings. Eventually I was able to distinguish her cloaked form from a distance, to pick her out from a group of women walking to the bakery just by her gait and the way she held her body. Even though we had to keep our distance, it felt like our souls left our bodies and danced together between the bread lines. When one of us was late to the bakery, we’d arrive to find worry lines on the other’s brow.

  I spent my nights staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out a way to speak to her. There were only two acceptable ways I could initiate a conversation: if she were a member of my family or if her father had granted me her hand in marriage. But I didn’t even know her name or where she lived. If she were caught talking with me, it would be a huge stain on her and on her family’s honor; the only women who talked to strange men were prostitutes. Approaching her would be considered a crime, the same as if I broke a window in her house and snatched her. There were plenty of men and women in Basra who had inexplicably vanished after breaking these community rules. The risk was simply too high.

  So I didn’t plan any of what happened next. One morning, I lingered after I got my bread and watched her start walking back toward her house. Just before the morning darkness swallowed my vision of her, I took a step, then another, and without considering the consequences, I found myself following her. I stayed three blocks behind, my senses heightened like an animal’s, listening for the sound of her footsteps and the swish of her abaya to guide me. Just as she rounded a corner, her fingers flashed out of her cloak and beckoned me forward. As I approached the corner, I heard a voice.

  “This way.”

  Did I really hear that? I slowed down, unsure of what to d
o. A thousand thoughts fired off at once, and now that the moment I’d imagined was truly coming, I was completely unprepared. Should I say hello? Hug her? Kiss her? Turn around and run?

  I rounded the corner and nearly knocked her down. She grabbed my arms to stop her fall and backed into the secluded breezeway of an office building. I could only make out the white of her teeth.

  “Oh! Sorry. I mean, hello,” I stammered.

  “You keep looking at me at the bakery,” she said. “Are you married?”

  “Are you?” I asked.

  We heard a noise, and I glanced down the street toward a row of cinder-block houses. A light went on in one of them.

  “We can’t talk here, it’s not safe for you,” I said. “Follow me.”

  I led her to the walled courtyard of my father’s home, where we could talk under the enormous date palm, away from public view. Nobody in my family woke up before the sun, so we were safe.

  “What do you want from me?” she whispered.

  She was direct. I liked that.

  “I fell in love with you.”

  She looked away and thought about this for a moment.

  “How do I know you aren’t just going to play with me and then deceive me?”

  Her eyes were black and piercing. I knew then that I could never gloss over the truth with this one. She’d catch me immediately.

  “I’ve been just looking at you for months now, and I’ve fallen in love with you,” I repeated.

  She kept staring, clearly waiting for something more convincing. I was giving her a nonanswer, and she was having none of it.

  “Your eyes alone are worth more to me than the whole universe,” I said. I know it sounded like a line, like something I’d used on girls at the falafel shop. But I really meant it.

  She smiled and reached for my hand. Her fingers were soft, like butterflies landing on my palm. I imagined those fingers tickling the back of my neck, fluttering down my spine, and I felt myself swell with desire for her and it was all I could do not to wrap my arms around her. Instead I plucked a fraying thread from a blanket drying on the clothing line. I tied it around her ring finger.

  “This is your wedding band; it’s temporary until I bring you a real gold engagement ring.”

  She twirled the string and turned her hand to look at it from all angles. Then she pulled me down to sit with her at the base of the tree and rested her head on my shoulder.

  “Close your eyes.”

  I obeyed.

  “I am in our home, and you just came home from work,” she said. “What have I made you for dinner?”

  I saw it, too. She and I, sitting on the ground before a low table filled with all our favorite foods.

  “Falafel,” I said. “Pickled beets, baba ghanoush, dates.”

  We continued that way, describing all the rooms in the house and the views from those rooms, even imagining what the birds sounded like in the morning. When I felt a light hit my face, I opened my eyes to see that the first of the sun’s rays were pushing through the palm fronds. People were stirring in the house, and we could be caught if she didn’t leave right away. I took her hand and helped her to stand. She readjusted her abaya, brushed the dirt from it, and smiled at me.

  “Are you coming to the bakery tomorrow? Shall I wait for you again?”

  “I will come,” I whispered.

  The only ones who knew about our daily four a.m. strolls were the stray dogs and the pigeons. Each morning after we bought our bread, Alyaa and I walked with the moonlight casting shadows behind us, and by the time our shadows had circled all the way to the front of us, we parted. I learned that she was nineteen and lived with her mother, who was blind in one eye. Her father had died in the army fighting the Kurds when she was a baby, and she had one brother who had joined the military. Her family had already chosen a husband for her, a thirty-five-year-old civil servant with a hefty family inheritance. But it was me she loved.

  Without a father at home, I’d have to negotiate with Alyaa’s mother for her hand in marriage. It was a long shot; the family had already promised Alyaa to that other man. When I told my mother that I had found a neighborhood girl I wanted to marry, she was against the idea, saying the war made it a terrible time to get married. What if I was called to duty and then widowed a new bride? Besides, she argued, I had brothers and sisters who needed me to take care of them. Her hypocrisy was not lost on me; Mother was remarried and had started a new family with three more children. Frustrated, I decided to ask my father for help.

  But a mother’s intuition is spooky. The very next day my father called to say he’d heard on the radio that all men born in 1952 and 1953 were to report to the military recruitment office.

  The war had come to get me. And there was no place to run. I would be taken to military court and jailed if I refused, and my family could be hurt if I fled. But if I didn’t fight, the Iranians could push into Basra and kill my family anyway. My responsibility was to protect them, to protect my country and help end this war.

  The reports on the radio said that Iran’s military was a chaotic mess, because one of Khomeini’s first orders had been to oust all of the Shah’s top military men, and he hadn’t had time to reorganize by the time fighting started two months before. Our ground forces had already occupied about ten thousand square miles of Iranian soil along the southern half of the border. We had control of several oil-rich cities in Khuzestan. Saddam Hussein was even offering a ceasefire, in exchange for full control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway. Many were predicting that Iraq would win the war in a matter of weeks. My stomach knotted at the thought of having to go back to the mind-numbing tedium and stink of the army, but I clung to the hope that there would be nothing left to do by the time I finished my training.

  I wore my military uniform to the bread line the next morning and chain-smoked to settle my nerves. Worse than having to give my life over to the military again was having to disappoint Alyaa. I was antsy and irritable and didn’t want to buy bread. What was the point anymore? I watched her wait in line until she reached the customer window, then lost my nerve and started walking back home. She followed. I reached the courtyard ahead of her and just partially shut the door, only half-hoping she would turn back. When her shadow crossed into the courtyard, I swung open the door and she fell into my arms, sobbing.

  “Are you going to leave me?” she cried.

  “I have no choice.”

  I lifted her hand and checked. The string was still there. I held her face in my hands and brought her close.

  “Listen. I’m never leaving you. Our love is bigger than whatever our families say, bigger than this war.”

  She caressed my hands and carefully kissed each of my fingers.

  “You can’t die,” she said.

  “We only have to wait a little longer, and when the fighting is over in a month or two, I will come back to marry you.”

  I tilted her head toward me and kissed her for the first time. I had anticipated tasting something sweet, like berries, but instead her lips were salty, from her tears. But that tang conducted an electrical charge that zinged from our mouths through my whole body. Every one of my follicles sizzled.

  “Promise?” she asked.

  I kissed the string on her finger.

  “Promise.”

  THREE

  CHILD SOLDIER

  We listened until we heard Mostafa crank the faucet for his morning shower. Omid went out first, saying he was going to wash the windows of his father’s truck. I waited until his mother turned toward the stove again, and then I slipped along the wall like the shadow of a passing cloud, then floated through the washroom and out the door. I ran to Mostafa’s truck and found Omid wiping a towel in lazy circles on the windshield. He threw down the towel and jumped off the hood when he saw me.

  “Got the letters?” he asked.

  I patted my waistband. Omid had always been a better student than me; he was always using big words and trying to sound all high-class, a
nd his handwriting already looked grown-up. Me, I was good at forging signatures. Together we created foolproof permission letters from our parents, allowing us to join the war. We were too young to join the regular military, of course, or Khomeini’s new Islamic Revolutionary Guard. But the Basij was the people’s militia, welcome to anybody who wanted to volunteer, especially boys like us. I took one last glance toward Omid’s house and made sure no one was watching us.

  “Don’t wimp out now,” Omid said.

  I slugged him, but not hard, on the shoulder and took off running.

  We jogged together toward the mosque. Since the war began eighteen months before, all the mosques had become recruitment centers for the Basij. As we passed by the rubble of what used to be our school, Omid fixed his gaze on the twisted rebar and concrete and roared, “Farideh, this is for you!” I was confused for a second and then I remembered: There was a shy girl in class who always used to peek at Omid through her long eyelashes. I didn’t think he cared, but apparently he did. The way his voice rattled with rage, it now seemed quite possible that he loved her; maybe he’d even privately chosen Farideh for his future wife. Normally, I would have teased him about this. But now, it didn’t seem right. Out of respect, I stood next to him, silently, until he decided it was time to continue on.

  We heard the mosque before we saw it. Now, in addition to the daily calls to prayer, the loudspeakers played revolutionary fight songs. As we got closer, we could make out the lyrics: “If you want the privilege of meeting Imam Husayn, you join the jihad to liberate the holy city of Karbala. You will join the martyrs and ensure your place in paradise.”

  There was a knot of people pushing to get inside the mosque. Omid and I elbowed our way through the crowd, slipping between legs and dodging other boys doing the same. I guess the Basij took men too old or broken to join the regular army, too, because I saw men with gray hair and hunched backs trying to get through the front door. Everyone was shouting at once about defending Islam, whipped up by the music. All I can say is that I would not want to be an Iraqi and meet these men on the battlefield; they were frothing like hunting dogs.